I'm not sure about the dent just in the lip, but the dent that starts in the lip and continues up to the nose is called the "philtrum."

I perpetually don't know what the word for things is. Is there a word for that? When you know what something's called but can't think of the word? There should be a word for it. I was using "aphasia" for a while but I know that means something else. (And I kept forgetting that word too.)

The hard part on the end of a shoelace is the aglet.
The metal frame that holds a lampshade is a harp.
The indentation at the bottom of a wine bottle is a punt.

I think that maybe philtrum was on that list too.

I've got a "what's that thing called" for you: I can never recall what the name is for that lump on the back of the skull we all have. Wikipedia seems to tell me that it's the occipital bone, but the old Grey's Gray's Anatomy (curse you, Shonda Rhimes...) pictures aren't particularly helpful.

I remember also being surprised several years ago when encountering the word "snib", which turns out to be the little button on a Yale lock that one uses to lock it open ("leaving it on the snib") or closed.

Some may also find it useful to know the word "perineum" exists. I'll leave the (likely NSFW) research to the curious.

If there isn't, may I propose omnisia? It works for me.

Doors in public buildings often have a small rubber thingy mounted on the wall next to them so the doorknob doesn't scuff up the wall. Does anyone know the name of that? (You might call it a doorstop, but to my mind a doorstop is something else).

Armscye (for those that don't sew) is the name of the armhole part of the body of a garment.

cisko, #8, they had aglet on there, too. I couldn't find the link until you posted aiglet. Using "arm hole" and aiglet in my search terms, I find it. Ta da! It is annoying that it is missing definitions for several items, but if you google armsaye, you'll find several lists like this.

Tilde; exclamation point; commercial at; number sign; dollar sign; percent sign; caret; ampersand; asterisk; (Parentheses); underscore; plus sign; broken bar (pipe, if it isn't broken.)

I hate it when people get them wrong.

Another big vocabulary-builder <ahem> was working on house renovations some twenty years ago. There are so many different bits of a building we either don't see (inside walls or roofs, under floors, etc) or are not aware of usually. After all this time out of practice I can't right now think of any except noggins & purlins, which you wouldn't usually see.

I suppose all you crafty & outdoor camping people know about those most useful round things called grommets, too.

There's a lot of others things associated with sewing and costume. Godet & plastron, frex, are of limited use, being fairly uncommon, but it's probably fairly important to know which is your placket (the supporting part around a slitlike opening) and which your pocket, even tho' they're sometimes the same.

-- Leva

Is there a term for this "thing we don't know there's a word for"?

The dot over a lower-case i or j is called a tittle. I wish that the bar that crossed a lower-case t were called a tattle.

That reminds me of my favorite scene in Key Largo. You know the movie's plot. The war is over, and Bogart goes to Key Largo to talk to the family of a soldier who'd died while under his command. And he tells the man's father about all the things that they'd talked about. One of them is how, when the soldier had been a very young child, his father had explained to him what the dent on his lip was: when he was born, he knew all the secrets of the world, but an angel had put its finger on his lip so that he couldn't tell the secrets. After that, Bogart and Bacall leave the room, leaving the old man so that he can grieve alone.

Google gives lots of plural nouns for cats, but (as I type impeded by a fluffy tail) my favorite is a "nuisance".

The bubbles in antique, handblown glass are occlusions.

I have a little philtrum
Wherein my spilltrum flows
When I am feeling illtrum
And runny at the nose.

The visible beams of light that shine down from water's surface are called caustics.

The process for adding the logo to television programming is called DSK or downstream key. (Logos or inconceivably annoying advertisements that take up more and more of the screen real estate, and more and more of our attention.*)

* I predicted years ago that commercials would start to play during shows. So far it's only for other shows on the same network. And so far no one is talking over the audio track of the show we are ostensibly watching. Those things will change.

foal: baby horse, either gender
weanling: horse, under 1 year, that has been weaned from its mother.
dam: the mother of a horse
sire: the father of a horse

colt: male horse under 4 years old
stallion: male horse over 4 years, not castrated
gelding: castrated male horse

filly: female horse under 4 years old
mare: female horse over 4 years old

The hard part on the end of a shoelace is the aglet.
Their true purpose is sinister!

folk@18: It's considered "speaking girl" to not know the names for things? How strange. I know sometimes, as a female, I feel that speaking too technically will make people think I'm a complete nerdy weirdo, so I'll deliberately avoid using the most technical term for an item, but I don't often give into that impulse now that I'm, well, old enough not to care anymore.

What I was referring to was when you know the word perfectly well, and you intend to use the proper word, but when you go to use the word, it's just not there.

There *must* be a word for that.

A baby kangaroo or wallaby is a joey.

A female kangaroo is a doe, flyer, or jill.

A marsupial's pouch is called a marsupium.

but that's just being able to say 'thingy' in Latin.

On a slight tangent, because it's an abstract concept rather than a "thing", ontology is, quite literally, the study of "thingyness". But to confuse matters, it comes from Greek.

Female goat: doe
Baby female goat: doeling

Sterile female goat (caused by sharing the same placenta as a buckling): freemartin

Note that "billy" and "nanny" are not generally used by people who actually raise goats.

There *must* be a word for that.

There is, but I've forgotten it.*

* Well, somebody had to! And Serge is probably still asleep.

Oops, sorry, just read back and found you there. Have some more coffee, you're being far too literal. Go meta, young man!

It appears that, technically, aphasia is only a valid diagnosis when the problem is caused by a brain injury (including disease processes like tumors), so everyday forgetfulness probably doesn't count.

My mother, who suffered regularly from the things, is a fount of alternate words for objects. 'The hot fridge' and 'spoon with holes in' for instance.

Now that I get the things relatively regularly (for a chap, anyway) I've been in the same state of being able to recognise that something is an object and that it has a name, but that the name is temporarily (thankfully!) missing. For some reason, John Cusack is one of the first things to go missing. It's... Not much fun.

I looked it up and lo and behold, she was not merely attempting to snow me in the interest of her triple word score. It was right there in the OSPD.

So technically, I think this means that those cardboard finger-protector sleeve thingums that all the coffee shops have are zarfs. Though I believe most call them "cup-sleeves."

Does Folger's Instant (but cheap) Crap count as coffee? Anyway, my apologies for the off-topic post.

Not totally off-topic, since Greg London brought up horses earlier... Did you know that the French word for stallion is étalon, which can also mean standard?

[0] That'd be 'elephant'... just not in english.

Which is thus called because it is shaped like a moon crescent, and did you known that the French word for moon is lune?

My favorites: a shrewdness of apes, a smack of jellyfish, an exaltation of larks, an ambush of tigers, and of course a murder of crows.

My absolute favorite: a surfeit of skunks. Indeed!

"I didn't know what they were, so I cut them off."

"Well, now you know."

The opening at the wrist of a long glove: the musketeer.

The roughened iron or steel plate against which a flint is struck to make a spark: frizzen.

I think the crossbar of a t is a jot; on this I might be wrong.

The outward step at the base of a wall is a berm.

Also called anomia. As there are more specific terms like averbia and colour anomia for people who can't remember verbs and colour words, respectively, anomia is often used to refer only to people who have trouble with common and proper nouns.

This happens to me a dozen times a day, usually at the least opportune times, either because I'm doing something important or I'm with family or friends who will make fun of me for ages. (I still haven't lived down the time I asked someone how to say "man" in French so I could finish some paper on Sartre.)

IIRC, one sign of anaemia is that your lunules become imperceptible - because the rest of the nail bed is so pale that there's no detectable colour change.
Weirdly, "lunule" was exactly the word I was going to cite as an example of "things you didn't know there was a name for".

"Rostrum" - not only a speaker's place, but also a beak - because the Greeks used to saw the prows, or beaks, off captured galleys and fix them to the speaker's stand as trophies.

Why?

My mother has the affliction quite strongly. She once asked me to go to the .... (vague gesture) and look in the .... and get me her....

The funny part was, I managed it. (Context is everything!)

#18, folk on LJ and #22, Diatryma - I seem to have heard "every little tittle and jot" as a phrase. It makes a lot more sense now.

#24, Nangleator - My husband worked at a TV station for a while, and apparently those logos that appear during a program are called "bugs." Apt, especially the newer ones that make noise. Argh.

For example, those elastic loops used to tie back hair? I've seen and heard any number of terms for them, none used ubiquitously. Hair elastics, hair frobs, scrunchies, ponytailers....

Also, those white ostensibly-temporary concrete barriers that show up on roadways, particularly during construction. I grew up calling those "Jersey walls," although here on the other coast nobody's ever heard that term. They best we can seem to manage here is "concrete barriers" -- a name both cumbersome and boring.

Plainly, they need a new obscure word for one of those things.

I'm surprised everyone here didn't already know about rabbets, figuring so prominently as they do in the film version of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. But even now I had to check to make sure that I knew what a lally column was (wikipedia has it wrong, of course).

For me, it is Tim Curry, every time. And saying, "You know, he was in Rocky Horror Picture Show. And Muppet Treasure Island. And that fantasy movie where he was unrecognizable under the makeup," doesn't help people know who I'm talking about.

What I find interesting are the things that have a word in one culture, but are generic in another. The two Canadian/American examples I know of are:
* "tuke" - in America, a "knit cap" or "hat"
* "grader" - in America, a big yellow construction vehicle.

The grader issue might be simply that Canadians are more familiar with the type of vehicle than most Americans. Probably a snow removal thing.

re: name-switching: my dear late grandmother used to have an awful time calling us grandchildren by the right first name (and only six of us in total!). She did the same with her sons-in-law, and as we grandchildren have grown she's started confusing us with our fathers and uncles too.

re: the momentary lack of ability to recall a specific word: the opposite of logorrhea, I suspect. (Logostipation?)

Joel @ 33: Interestingly, "this one" and "that one" in Chinese (Mandarin, at least, and I assume the other dialects) are reversed: "this one", zhei ge is closer to me, and "that one", nei ge is nearer to you. "nei ge" is also the Chinese word for "um", and can be pronounced confusingly close to an unpleasant racial epithet.

That would be Legend, starring Tom Cruise. And there was a zombie unicorn somewhere in there.

What was mortifying was not having forgotten, but the fact that when my friend said, "Homme", I grew impatient, and said, "Well, spit it out!" I'll never live it down.

When they started to have sound effects on those damn lower-margin ads is when I ceased to have television in the house. If it's not on YouTube or Google Video, I don't need to see it. Not to mention I watched two movies in a row on USA and realized that every "unnecessary" scene had been deleted to make more time for commercials -- resulting in good movies being coverted into Cliff-Notes versions of themselves via the removal of everything which made them worth watching.

When you can't even rely on television to uphold its traditional cultural standards, you know you've reached the point in your life when you need to go off the grid and learn to play the banjo. Yes, folks, I've become a true curmudgeon.

It's called a paraphasic error - there's several different types of paraphasic errors, some involve not remembering names (anomia) others involve substituting similar words. I tried to find a decent website that talked about the different forms of paraphasic errors but failed miserably in my attempt.

When you can't find the word at all and talk yourself around to what you mean, that's called circumlocution

@69, a frenulum/frenum is any such fold that attaches one part of the body to another in the same way. There's one attaching the each lip to its respective gum as well. And, without wanting to make naughty references twice in the comment to the same post, we all have one below the belt, whether we're homo sapiens model XX with full internal bits or model XY with the nifty extendable hose.

The thing that hangs down at the back of your mouth is your uvula.
The little cartilage triangle on the other side of the ear canal from your ear is your tragus.
If you should (Ghods forbid) get your eye poked out, the goo running down your cheek is called vitreous humor.

I thought everyone knew this, but I've had a few people thank me for pointing it out to them:
Dirty money is money that can be traced back to a crime. Clean money can't be. Money laundering is so called because it's the process by which dirty money becomes clean.

As to the noisy, distracting commercials on top of programming, I imagine it's an effort to get us to buy the whole freaking season of that show on DVD. In the future, television shows will become 42-minute-long commercials for the DVD box sets which feature the shows sans (most of) the advertising.

I hate runaway capitalism. I just haven't figured out what to replace it with yet. I also haven't figured out how to keep the wealthy people from murdering me if I do figure out a better system.

#11: I don't know if there's a special word (other than doorstop) for the rubber things on walls that doors knock into, but rubber things that act as buffers between hard things (such as the ones on the bottom of your walking stick or laptop) are ferrules.

And # is sometimes called 'square' in the UK but is much more often called 'hash'.

Lunules are on the proximal/hand-side of the fingernail, right? Looking at my fingernails, I can find paler parts just at the base of the nail, but only on my thumbs and maybe my middle fingers if I'm lenient.

The difference between larva and juvenile, as I understand it: a larva is something like a caterpillar or a pluteus, which does not look anything like the adult. A juvenile is like a puppy or a child, which is an immature adult lookalike.

Bridget @28:that's funny! Maybe it runs in families and it's either sex affected but not both? My mother does the same thing with names, by the way; my sister and I wait until the long string of names is over and the last one named is the one mom actually wants.

Joel @33: around my house that sounds about right!

R.M. Koske @53: Well, my dad can too, for my mom. But when I, who am usually fairly precise, fall prey to the "cosa" syndrome, he has the heebies.

Victoria @74: I like it!

Thank you. Normally I can call the title of that one to mind, but apparently Tim Curry's effect is spreading. (And pointing out that Tim Curry is so made up in one of my three examples was funnier than using Google..)

You might to check out the Archive of Endangered Words for a mighty fine collection.

http://www.13d.org/esofword/esof.cfm?type=new

Is it actually a pound sign in the US? I've never seen Americans use anything but "lb" for pounds (or "£" of course), as far as I can remember.

Solution to the problem in the OP: PNH should switch to wearing trousers with braces. (All right, "suspenders". But that sounds very odd to British ears.) Or, alternatively, platform boots, raising his belt loops out of the strike plate strike zone.

http://www.13d.org/esofword/esof.cfm?type=main

This list puts you on the moderated list of words.

(The other list I gave you is the one for those submitted; it contains a bunch of junk. So sorry!)

*whiteprints, actually

Alison Scott, 75 #11: I don't know if there's a special word (other than doorstop) for the rubber things on walls that doors knock into, but rubber things that act as buffers between hard things (such as the ones on the bottom of your walking stick or laptop) are ferrules.
I thought ferrule referred to the bit of metal that holds something on, like the bit that holds an eraser onto a pencil?

ajay, 84,
Is it actually a pound sign in the US? I've never seen Americans use anything but "lb" for pounds (or "£" of course), as far as I can remember.
In commercial contexts it is. E.g. "hand me a ream of the the 24# white, please." (Pronounced "twenty -four pound white", referring to a specific weight of paper.) Sometimes seen in agricultural markets, or recipes.**

**when did receipt turn into recipe? And when did "in to" turn into "into?"

In some regions of the United States and Canada, the symbol is traditionally called the pound sign, but in others, the number sign. This derives from a series of abbreviations for pound, which is a unit of weight. At first "lb." was used; however, printers later designed a font containing a special symbol of an "lb" with a line through the ascenders so that the lowercase letter "l" would not be mistaken for the number "1". Unicode character U+2114 (℔) is called the "LB Bar Symbol," and it is a cursive development of this symbol. Ultimately, there was the reduction to a combination of two horizontal strokes (cf. skewed "=") and two forward-slash-like strokes (cf. "//"). In this respect, names like fence or square — as well as the representation of the sign containing two vertical strokes (rather than slanted ones), as on many keyboards — are misleading.
Its traditional commercial use in the U.S. was such that when it followed a number, it was to be read as "pounds," as in 5# of sugar, and when it preceded a number, it was to be read as 'number', as in #2 pencil. Thus the same character in a printer's type case had two uses.

You read the same book as me! The one where spaceships are being described as various symbol-shapes? This makes this thread the perfect one to ask a question about something that I've been trying to remember since I was 12: the book had a word for the infinity symbol that wasn't just infinity symbol, but every site I looked up, last time I checked, just had "infinity symbol". Anyone know the name?

as far as I could tell, the only reason a # is called a 'pound sign' is because on the US keyboard, the # appears where the English pound sign appears on English (and Empire) keyboards. But Wikipedia says it was actually used as a pound indicator (weight), as in 5# is 5 pounds of good red wheat. Too sensible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign

My mother never uses the "thingy" replacement, she just swaps words around or uses MSL (Mom Sign Language, aka gesticulation.) More than once she's said "put the dirty dishes in the microwave/washing machine/deep freezer/etc"

I have an LJ aquaintance who rehabs orphan platypuses, and he uses puggle, as does the zoo he works with, so that's good enough for me.

Technically speaking, that bump is the external occipital protuberance. But occipital bun works too.

Yay, my physanth degree comes in handy!

Which brings me to Malthus #11: Doors in public buildings often have a small rubber thingy mounted on the wall next to them so the doorknob doesn't scuff up the wall. Does anyone know the name of that?

According to my son Ben, this device is called a wobber. Now, if you'll excuse me, there's no school today, so he's set up a first-grade classroom in our living room and given me an arithmetic assignment to do.

I have a problem with the frequent use of French and the equivalent as "advanced"; I speak French and have a bit of a vocabulary in a handful of other languages, so those terms are pretty easy for me, and not really commonly used by English-speakers otherwise. And sometimes I think they split the hair of meaning oddly enough that the "right" answer is just as valid as second place.

I have a rather strong touch of verbal paraphrasia, so I'm always saying desk instead of pen or banana instead of bag. It falls under anomia also, which appears to be a pretty big bucket.

It was a bother, no doubt.

(And for all the tons of hay I've moved in my life, I've never once heard any amount of it called a squeeze).

I am utterly shameless in calling the tapered brass thing a wallace.

Bridget 28: It's sometimes called the "tip of the tongue phenomenon," especially if you had the word in your head, or thought you did, until you tried to say it.

Janet 37: Hmm, I have aphasic episodes during a migraine, and my neurologist didn't argue with me when I called them that. I wonder what they do call such a transitory effect?

Matt 46: Tell him, right now, what his genitals are, and what they're for!!!!

Nix 60: Or "sharp."

folk 61: My great-grandmother used to call her youngest daughter "Nita-Babe-Oh, the devil! Ruth!"

Not sure what you mean by your Chinese example. That seems like the deixis of 'this' and 'that' that I'm used to.

'Deixis' is my contribution to the "words for things you didn't know there were words for" game we seem to be playing. And yes, there was a "Journal of Irreproducible Results" paper called "Deixis in the Lesbian Dialects."

tavella 89: Lemniscate.

Technically all light focused through a dielectric material is a caustic. The term describes the spots where the light is focused, not the beams.

Some more words for stuff:

In California, the bumpy dots on highways and roads are Bott's Dots.

There are kind of too many names for road surfaces (based on their construction) to list all, but the common surfaces are tarmac, asphalt concrete and macadam. It would take a lot of space to explain each, and Wikipedia has good entries on them.

Product packaging that consists of a cardboard back with a clear plastic bulge inside which the product is visible is called a blister pack.

The point at which a liquid touches a solid (such as the raised area on the surface of water where a straw penetrates it, or at the edges of a cup, or around a rock) is called the meniscus.

As mentioned above, the flap of skin connecting lip, tongue and parts south is a frenulum. However, the thin 'seam' on the southern bits (of both persuasions) is called the raphe. The word describes the seam between any body parts.

The ability to know where your body is in space -- to have a sense of when you might be near another object because you have a kind of 3d map in your head -- is called proprioception.

Also, note that # and ♯ are not the same. The first is pound or number, the second is the musical symbol for sharp. Microsoft may want you to call it "C Sharp" but they write it C#, so it's really "C Pound" even if that doesn't sound nearly as cool.

The two pertinent meanings from the OED: Ferrule, n.
1. A ring or cap of metal put round the end of a stick, tube, etc. to strengthen it, or prevent splitting and wearing.
2. A ring or band, usually either giving additional strength or holding the parts of anything together.

Apparently the etymology can be traced back to the latin for bracelet.

According to Wikipedia, it derives from the abbreviation "lb." Printers put an additional slash through the L so it wouldn't be mistaken for a numeric 1 -- and it morphed from there.

Silly me.

(I've still got the Liberator kit from Comet Miniatures, unbuilt, waiting for me to Do Something about it...)

Passion for buying things.

Because my experience is the opposite, and I suspect that the difference is entirely situational.

The weak half (generally from its midpoint to its tip) is the foible.

This isn't especially obscure, but I love the term for the thin sheet of material affixed across the back of many desks: the modesty panel.

My friend Steve has that. The priests give him a special rice cracker at communion. He says "Hey, if I ever need to lose ten pounds, all I have to do is eat one donut!" He does not need to lose ten pounds. He's a carpenter, and not eating anything with gluten in it keeps your diet fairly restricted!

A ferrule is a metal sleeve, tube or collar. It provides protection (the bottom of a cane) or access (to pipes and cable loops) and is generally fitted or held in places with screws.

That's funny, I call that the front of the desk! I guess I think of desks that have one as being a classroom thing...and of course the part of the teacher's desk that was toward me was the front, not the back.

Again, this is a phenomenon of deixis.

Hey, does anyone know if originally only desks for women had those modesty panels?

R. M. Koske @53: somebody, I think on rec.arts.tv.mst3k, coined the term "obnoxicon" for those logos in the corner of the TV screen. I like it.

Bob @112: the thin sheet of material affixed across the back of many desks

I call it "the @#*%ing thing that keeps me from being able to get at the network jacks or the outlets", since the desks around here are generally against walls.

I have snagged more sweaters on strike plates than I care to think about. Also skin.

As for the other, does he have a neurological disorder, or is he just a PITA on principle?*

*That would be the PITA principle. *ducks*

Saying "for-tay" is also acceptable, but it's the secondary pronunciation.

I find that it's always profitable to say "fort" and have a wordinista correct you -- place a bet ($5) and consult the dictionary.

That's similar to the "the other left!" principle, also sometimes called "your left or my left?". It isn't restricted to people with a bad sense of direction, though.

Oh, and "mule" is specifically the offspring of a jack and a mare; the get of a stallion and a jenny is called a "hinny".

ctate, #55: IME, "scrunchy" refers specifically to a frilly fabric donut with the elastic at the inner rim. Plain hair-elastics are not scrunchies.

Here are a few unusual words from the area of jewelry:
- a flat-backed stone, usually unfaceted, is a cabuchon (generally abbreviated to "cab")
- the ring of metal that holds a cab in place is a bezel
- rough stones are prepared for polishing by adhering them to a wooden or metal rod with wax; this rod is a "dop stick"

And when a cake plate -- whether porcelain or glass or whatever -- has extrusions on either side that make carrying it easier, these aren't called 'handles'. They're 'ears.'

Serge @19 -- my husband's grandmother had a similar story with an angel and a philtrum. She told my husband that people have philtrums (philtrae? philtra?) because just when we're about to be born, an angel pokes us just under the nose and says, "You're ready!

Xopher @98 -- aphasic episodes and migraines. Yep. Unfortunately. I've only experienced that during one migraine (pregnant at the time, apparently not all that uncommon), but it scared the dickens out of me.

One of my college friends used 'gitchie' and 'blivet'. She explained that a "gitchie" could be alive, whereas a "blivet" was always inanimate. So an exotic insect could be a gitchie, but never a blivet, whereas an unidentifiable plastic object could be either.

I'm trying to train myself to use 'guvat'. But that goes along with other ROT-13 slang, and is not the same at all.

Conversation, from life:

J. "Give me that thing, there, *points*"
F "You'll have to be more specific, dear."
J "Please give me that thing, right there *points harder*"
F *confused look* followed by handing J spomething 120degrees out of phase from correct object.
J "Not this thing, that thing right next to where it was."
F "I need a noun!"
J *Thinks hard, entire vocabulary disappears. Lets go of item being repaired, if possible, gets tool herself*
F "Oh, that thing. What is that thing, anyway?"

Lather, rinse, repeat, 25 years and counting.

*I can almost guarantee the gender of the miscreant.

In my social circle, "Thingy!" is used more often as a frustrated curse than to refer to an actual item, though "whatsit" and "thingamabob" come up often. Only the guy who grew up locally uses "doodad."

* Missionaries, dozens of supporting families we saw maybe once every four years. It came up a lot.

philtrum and philtre obviously have the same derivation. In Kipling's Kim, the Sahiba mockingly accuses Kim:

He has been running among the women. Look at his eyes - hollow and sunk - and the Betraying Line from the nose down! He has been sifted out! Fie! Fie!

My family always used schmitchik for unidentifiable whatsits, thingummies, and whaddayacallums, which is either Yiddish or a word my grandfather made up that sounded Yiddish.

For years, I've gotten presents from my dad labeled as "from the benevolent Christmas schmitchik."

So cats claw clews? Kewl!

The stallion is at a breeding farm for this, and there are generally no training facilities there. Some farms, such as Three Chimneys, do have exercise programs to keep their stallions in shape, but it's not as rigorous as racetrack training.

Also, stallions who are in breeding service tend to be more aggressive and harder to handle than males who are not breeding. There's also the possibility of a racetrack injury that, even if it's not severe, could interfere with breeding.

and @ 134: I tend to substitute kittens, puppies, and "the thing with the stuff" for nouns I can't remember. I got the cute fluffy animals from my husband, who uses them as space-filler for missing verbs as well.

The one where you really don't want to leave a finger when the door is closed because the lever action will make your finger an ex-finger much quicker than if you slam a door on it the normal way.

I'm asking because there is a word for it in Icelandic ("fals" if anyone is interested) and it's been bugging me ever since I realised I didn't know the English equivalent.

As far as migraines and aphasia go, I don't get that-- but the warning I get is proprioceptive. I lose my left arm, sometimes the entire left side of my body, so I can move it, treat it as normal, but it doesn't register as myself, if that makes sense. First migraine I had, I walked to the nurse's office thinking, "Seizure or stroke?"

Excess material leaking out of mold cavities at the seams and harding is flash. Splay is a frosted texture you get when trapped moisture vapourizes. Sometimes that's not a sprue it's the runners and gates depends on the cavity set up of the mold.
I still have burn scars from the screw barrel and injection nozzle.

When giving a scientific presentation, "moiety" is my thingy-like word of choice when I lose the noun. I realized early on that I needed such a tool.

There's a USB plug-in thing called a dongle which some companies provide as a frustrating anti-piracy device (without the dongle, their software won't run). Fun to say.

Prescription glasses for dogs with poor vision are called Doggles.

Apparently my brain is only accessing "do*" words today.

Okay, back to Chinese. Let's say I'm standing on the customer side of a cafeteria line. Li is standing on the other side, and there are two trays between us: one of pork and one of rice.

Physically:

folk | pork | rice | Ling

In Chinese, assuming that the , the rice is nei ge, and the pork is zhei ge. However, in meaning, the "nei" means "inside", as in "nei guo ren", which means "inside-country-people", "not foreigners". So, semantically my deixis is reversed from English. Does that make more sense?

Now, you want some interesting deixis, ask the people who live up near the Arctic. QI, the Stephen Fry panel quiz, tells me that they have different deixes for, e.g., "that thing we can't see", "the one up there", and so on.

The Chinese word for "thing" is "dongxi", which literally means "east-west".

In space, no-one can hear you scream in Chinese.

Spike @ 140, I seem to recall that the Economics meaning of widget predates the Guinness version. Economists were not inconsiderably put out about it at the time, apparently.

JESR: (And for all the tons of hay I've moved in my life, I've never once heard any amount of it called a squeeze).

That reads like a back formation from squeeze loader, the modern contraption that allows a single-handed human to pick up a block of hay and set it--well, anywhere, but originally on a truck.

Obligatory definition: only thing that comes to mind is "kerf," the space taken up (or taken out of the stock) by a saw cut.

Regarding the unfortunately similar heights of Patrick's belt loops and a strike plate, I have been known to tell people that I gave up on science because the forward projection of my hipbone (which undoubtedly has a name) is the same height as a standard lab bench. I had a little bump there all through organic chemistry.

Nangleator #13: Ive heard that an older term for the "at-sign" is the "arabesque".

Bridget #18, et seq.: In my old techie crowd, we'd say "the noun server's down". (Indeed, it's not just "girls"!)

#49: IIRC a "grader" is a specific type of machine, used for smoothing and angling ("grading") the road surface.

A goodly number of the words mentioned clearly exist because somebody neded to call it something!

A chamfer is "a symmetrical sloping surface at an edge or corner", or as a verb the process of making such a surface. Janet Kagan used the word beautifully in Hellspark for the process of smoothing out conflicts between people from different cultures. (The etymology is from French and leads back to "broken edge".)

The analogous smoothing of a concave corner is a fillet.

If you look at random unorganized things and see patterns in them, that's "apophenia". If you then go on to insist those patterns are meaningful or significant, it's "pareidolia".

And Julia Jones at 109, you are absolutely correct on the usefulness of bits and pieces of sprue.

The first account I ever read.

Another one, fairly convincing, that contradicts it (a PDF).

A roundup of various conflicting explanations.

"fals" is a good example of what I was thinking of - a thing for which there is a word in one language, but it isn't broken out as a separate thinger in another language.

PS - my spelling has been corrected offline. A "knit cap" can be a toque, touque, or a tuque but not a tuke or a Took.

So cats claw clews? Kewl!

Lol!

A barf-glob is "A wad of tangled yarn that comes out of the middle of a center-pull skein of yarn when you are attempting to knit from the skein." (First described/discussed here). What I find interesting is the term's instant and enthusiastic acceptance. It just so obviously fits.

I think I'll have to start calling the less-desirable end of yarn to pull from a skein the "red herring."

We also speak of things has having been "roonified," or suffering from "roonification," IOW subjected to some process of alteration which we don't know what it's called or we can't be bothered to remember the word just then.

*Deriving from the fact that there are so many towns and villages ending with -kirchen. So Dingenskirchen indicates generic-ness.

In my family vocabulary, for at least 40 years, "greeble" has meant the meaningless advertising prose on things like wine bottles. Considering that this usage predates and resembles the cinematic greeble, and considering that we're probably less than six degrees of separation from Lucas, who coined it, I suspect that we have the original meaning. (One of our friends, an English teacher, had a GREEBLE stamp made to mark paragraphs of fluff prose.)

And my favorite term? murnival, meaning four of something. It's from an obscure card game called gleek, but I think it should be revived for, for instance, supermarket checkout lines.

Puggles were critters (stuffed toys) from the really cool but now gone store called the Lost Forest.

I always heard a Widget was the tab that you pull to crack open an aluminium can.

Puggles were critters (stuffed toys) from the really cool but now gone store called the Lost Forest.

I always heard a Widget was the tab that you pull to crack open an aluminium can.

The clusters of black dots used by Jack Kirby (and legions of imitators) to signify the negative space around discharges of unearthly energy are known as Kirby crackle. (Tutorial and discussion.)

To scumble is to take up a little bit of paint on a dry paintbrush, and brush it over a dry surface, leaving a patch of broken color.

• Old/traditional words, such as philtrum
• Old/traditional words which are still in heavy use in the context of specific trades or skill sets, such as strike plate which started this all off. (If you've ever replaced all the doorknobs and locks in a house, you probably remember "strike plate" by the end of it even if you're not a carpenter.) Similarly for cabuchon, dado (not to be confused with dido, all the horse terms...)
• Modern coinages, a la McMansion, octothorpe or a vast host of technical words.
• Sniglet-type cute inventions, a la Californication. (In my book, these don't count, but of course some of them end up going into common use like "McMansion" has.)

Just schematizing obsessively - but my original point was that I think the first two categories are much more interesting.

Fungi @ #59, #166: If you had had a typical construction-obsessed 5 year old boy on hand, you could have found out in no time flat that that machine is called a "grader", or certain types specifically a "road grader".

The most extreme example I've seen of that is when a local station showed the movie version of Kurt Vonnegut's HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE... and edited out every scene that Wanda June appeared in.

You had more literate peers than I; I was simply known as Dictionary Foley (by analogy with Encyclopedia Brown).

THAT'S IT!!! I've been trying for years to remember a) what the word was (thanks to all the above who posted "philtrum") and b) how I came to know it in the first place.

I loved the Elliot S. Maggin books; the best thing about Superman I & II was that the movies spawned the otherwise unrelated tie-in books. I still re-read them occasionally. My favorite part was when Superman saved the Museum of Modern Art(?) before all the other stuff imperiled that day because "Superman had always had a soft spot for American pop culture." Elliot S. Maggin is long overdue for his Nobel Prize in literature, IMHO.

More to the point of the thread: I hereby move that, henceforth, any set of more than four house dogs be collectively referred to as an "annoyance."

Avram @ 174: I prefer the definition of scumble as a (made up) noun: an alcoholic beverage made from "apples, mostly" that is not, technically speaking, potable. "It is drunk in thimbles, is strong enough to be used for cleaning spoons, and should not be put in a metal container or allowed to come into contact with water." (Quotes from the Discworld wiki at lspace.org.)

Re: armadillo roadkill from joann @ 177: Is it true that an armadillo's response to bright lights and/or being startled is to jump straight up to about Mack-truck-grille height?

Dixie Follies?

Well, that's an empirical question, if I've ever heard one!

We had very unusual pasta that day.

I thought it might be a flavor of apocope, but apparently it's G-dropping (or perhaps "G-droppin'").

A druk is a smoothly convex pressed-glass bead, usually a simple round but sometimes a flattened ovoid. Semi-similarly, a rivoli is a faceted shape (generally of a rhinestone, but sometimes of a bead) that rises to a central point on both sides and has a plane of symmetry halfway between those points; the equatorial boundary of a rivoli is usually circular but sometimes shaped like a heart or marquise/navette, the latter pair of synonyms which refers to a cut whose footprint resembles a longitudinal cross-section of a football: an oval-like shape that converges to sharp points at both ends, also known as a vesica piscis or mandorla.

The characteristic silvery-blue "billow" of light beneath the surface of a moonstone is adularescence. The similar blue-green fire in labradorite, a related family of feldspars, is labradorescence. The glittery reflections from inside aventurine is aventurescence (stunning originality, eh).

The overall quality of a material's or object's light-passing-throughness (opaque, translucent, transparent) is diapheny.

And now for some reason I'm visualizing armadillos decked out like droidekas for Halloween.

OtterB @ 191: It's available for very cheap from various places through AbeBooks.

Coming soon.. Francis Ford Coppola's Apocope Now...

My favorite deixis joke: Two linguists are walking down the street. Which one is the specialist in contextually indicated deixis and anaphoric reference resolution?

The other one.

Well, Indiana Jones was a teacher.

re: widgets, I always think of Sturgeon's "The (Widget), the (Wadget), and Boff", from the um. mid- to late-50's, maybe? *wanders over to Contento site* yep, 1955, anthologized in A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, Vol. 1. Which is in one of the four (!) cartons still not sorted and shelved or put back into storage, so I won't dig it out to re-read it today. Not with this migraine, anyway.

You've reminded me that I own a copy of that delicious reference book! And lo, ten dusty minutes later, I found it at the bottom of one of the lesser bookshelves.
A random sample (feel free to request more via random numbers for page and entry counts):

empleomania: n. a mania for holding public office.
mechanomorphism: n. the doctrine that the universe is fully explicable in mechanistic terms.
quern: n. a spice grinder.
tiddledies: n.pl chunks of floating ice.
zneesy: adj. freezing, frosty. also znusy.

I should have stuck to nouns but I forgot how much fun this book is.

I read that as "bare" armadillos and wondered how the hell you get them outta the shell.

Yay Scott with the JLU ref FTW!

I had occasion to think of that line a lot watching my husband work his way through Metal Gear Solid 3 last night. Every time the main character puts a knife to a nameless enemy character's throat and growls, "Speak!" I expected one of the enemy characters to grit out the line about the aglets.

Metal Gear Solid 3 is an incredibly badly scripted anti-commie torture-porn flick posing as a video game with stupidly long cut-scenes and (reportedly) all the controls in the wrong places, with a soundtrack that belongs in one of the cheezier James Bond movies. The visuals are nice, though.

As we all know, Bob, small, random bits of junk are known collectively as "cruft." As my husband and I found out, while visiting a marine museum (shaped like a ship) in Penzance, this is a Cornish word referring to the dry, flaky material that collects inside objects found underwater.

It is more common, however, to discover that the material which has collected inside your underwater object, is dark, oozy, and sticky. That is called "clib." I use "clib" to describe the... stuff I find when I clean in the back corner of refrigerators. I hope others will do likewise.

I'm a keen railfan, and railroading has its own weird vocabulary. This is made especially interesting because the vocabulary is almost totally disjoint between Britain and the US - probably because the major development in railroading was in the period between American independence and the coming of better communication between continents.

Even more interestingly, different railroad companies often had their own language and their own terms - because of the way the industry and unions were set up, people rarely if ever moved between companies. If a locomotive engineer with one road went to work for another, he would lose all his years of seniority and have to start again at the bottom. (It still works this way in commercial aviation, interestingly, which is why pilots don't switch between airlines).

One thing that seems to have persisted in railroads later than most is the spelling of the word employee as employè - I think I got the accent the right direction there! This was a common spelling pre 1900 universally but persisted in railroading till the 1960s at least.

One of my favourite less-than-common words is meniscus for liquid or foam which bulges over the lip of a container without spilling. I am Mensicus Girl - my superhero power is being able to pour champagne so the foam bubbles out of the flute but doesn't spill.

As to the what-was-that-word range of maladies: aphasia is when you know there's a word for something but can't drag it into the light, dysphasia is when you inadvertently say a word which sounds like, but does not mean anything like, the word you meant. It's a pain in the asked.

Mack trucks not required; armadillos' normal levitation height seems to be something more like a pickup bumper. That is, there's darn few Mack trucks on back Texas roads, and a hell of a lot of dead armadillos. But yes, they do jump straight up.

I learned recently that the collective noun for a group of starfish is "a constellation of starfish".

A lot of mid-19th century railroad equipment in the US was imported, along with the people who built and maintained it - one of my great-great-grands was a 'railway machinist', aka mechanic (born in York, married in Manchester, died in Terre Haute). Why we have our standard gauge of 4 ft 8.5 inches, and possibly why heavy-rail locomotives are right-hand drive (the engineer sits on the right side of the cab).

Lunules are on the proximal/hand-side of the fingernail, right? Looking at my fingernails, I can find paler parts just at the base of the nail, but only on my thumbs and maybe my middle fingers if I'm lenient.

visible lunules in every nail are more common for people of african descent (ok, recent african descent), than those of european descent. i don't know about other non-european groups (i learned this in frantz fanon unit of intro to cultural theory).

serge,

the philtrum legend that you know everything (in this case, all of torah) before you're born & then the angel kisses it away, is widespread in my american-orthodox-jewish community. every kid was taught that. no idea how old it is, though.

xopher,

I was sometimes referred to as an ambulatory lexicon in high school.

me, too. but not in those words (i never had the shock of suddenly not being the smartest person in the room, like many nerds have to deal with, though, because i have older siblings).

the book had a word for the infinity symbol that wasn't just infinity symbol, but every site I looked up, last time I checked, just had "infinity symbol". Anyone know the name?

Lemniscate?

I call that a 'seam ripper', as does the packaging on the one I just bought.

Generally: My father has the forgetting-common-words problem, most noticeably at the dinner table. ("Please pass the, um--" and we check to see where he's looking and pass whatever it is he doesn't have.) I used to ascribe this to the fact that English is not his first language, until I started doing it, too. So it's not necessarily sex-linked even within a family.

nei(4) as in 'that' = 那
nei(4) as in 'inner' = 內

So it could be a play on words, I imagine, but I'd quite missed the story where they came from the same word. (Then, I've heard 那 mostly as 'na', so maybe it's bias - and I'm so, so far from fluent in any case.)

So do military services. After I got out of the Navy in 1974 I went out to Kwajalein, which is an Army base. Long and short, all the USN terms and regulations I knew for radioteletype comms were not in use there; I had to learn the all-powerful Army Regs for my specific field.

This made for interesting arguments between supervisors who'd been trained in one service and grunts who'd been trained in another.

Not related to anything in this thread, for the longest time I though binder clips were called "elephant clips." No, I have no idea why.

My family calls one of these a quickunpick. I suspect that at some time in the misty past, it was the brand name of one which belonged to a forebear. It's certainly not the brand of mine, my mums or my nanas, though.

One thing about the Navy vs. Army terminology difference is that much of that is quite deliberate. Heaven forbid that the Navy should be stuck with using an army word!

One thing about the Navy vs. Army terminology difference is that much of that is quite deliberate. Heaven forbid that the Navy should be stuck with using an army word!

Reflection counts too. One of the classic examples of a caustic is sunlight reflected off of a bicycle rim onto the road.

I imagine that a true lexiphanes might indulge in verbigeration or bombast. (Both also AWAD words in the last year.)

The clusters of black dots used by Jack Kirby (and legions of imitators) to signify the negative space around discharges of unearthly energy are known as Kirby crackle. (Tutorial and discussion.)

Thanks for that link! Being ignorant of their proper name, I always called those dots "cosmic energy."

Now can you lead me to a tutorial on how to draw scientific equipment so as to resemble a collection of saxophone parts?

I can answer that one empirically! On a camping trip on one of the Georgia barrier islands when I was young, our family came across an armadillo nosing through the woods. Leaving the rest of us to watch, my dad snuck around behind it and poked it with a stick. The armadillo did indeed jump vertically, about 3 feet high, and took off like a rocket when it hit the ground.

Then we laughed ourselves sick.

The vertical stroke used in writing the letter i (for example) is called a minim. The word "minim" is made of letters that all used to be written entirely using minims.

Mez @ #16, a plastron is also the nether shell of a turtle (the upper shell is the carapace).

How about some verbs for a change?

To sniggle: to fish for eels.
To gig: to spear frogs with a small trident.
To noodle: to attempt to catch fish barehanded.

To circumduct: to lead or pull around in a circle; esp. used of the leg motion used by those who are unable to flex the hip to lift the foot off the floor.

vir modestus @ #54: other occupations--

a luthier builds or repairs stringed instruments
a farrier shoes horses or mules

imaginal disks are the small clusters of cells in a caterpillar that "feed" on the dissolving tissues of the caterpillar as it pupates and then develop into the adult (or imago).

retterson @ #83, other means of divining the future include scapulomancy (heating a poker and burning an animal's scapula, or shoulderblade, with it, then reading the resulting cracks)

JESR @ #97, how about a leaf of hay? (one of the flat rectangular sections that a bale falls apart into)

dichroic: having the property of splitting incident light into two divergent beams; a feature found in calcite crystals (if you look through one at a page of print, or similar, you'll see double)

Leva @ #108, and others: the original meaning of "escutcheon" is "shield" (as in, a blot on one's escutcheon); the other meanings all derive from its use for generally shield-shaped or shielding thingies.

Music is a rich source of interesting words. Melisma is the singing of many consecutive notes on a single syllable.

Wolfa @ #128, see here for the most head-explodey "other left" in literary history.

My favorite word for the thing whose name I can't remember is "doohickey". Though when I was a child, my peers and I also said "thingdoogie".

Debbie @ #167, "barf-glob" is clearly one of those things that was crying out for a name of its own.

Bastardized theater term: "to dutchman" is to conceal the gaps between adjacent flats by covering them with strips of muslin dipped in glue or paint (before painting the entire assemblage).

shadowsong @ #184, it's true. You can observe this for yourself if an armadillo wanders into your campsite. In fact, since armadillos have virtually no short-term memory, you can startle the same one repeatedly. There was also a quite good photo in National Geographic that captured the phenomenon.

Nathan @ #210: armadillo is sometimes referred to here in Georgia as "possum on the half-shell".

pfusand @ #215: my nephew coined the word "gribis" to refer to cruftlike materials; specifically, gribis is what's left inside a toybox after you've removed all the toys.

Oh, and Patrick, you have my sympathy. Being 5'5", I am exactly the right height for the pockets on my scrub top to get caught on the handles of wheelchairs.

C. Wingate @216: One thing that multiplies words is that professions having many superficially similar but differently used/executed things give each of them a different name.

Ye gods, yes. There are some unholy tangles of mutual incomprehension between jewelers and geologists about the definitions of "chalcedony", "onyx", and "agate", among other terms.

Meanwhile, I have just blanked out on the word that describes the lemniscate-like shape traced in the sky by an entire year of co-graphing the position of the sun at the same time every day-- oh wait, I've successfully managed to Google it down: analemma. (IIRC there was a Particle at some point showing the analemmas of various other planets in our solar system.)

I think there's a dirty joke somewhere in there.

Or crime-fighting tights that look like they're made from saxophone parts?

Didn't Blackbolt, leader of the Inhumans, have Kirby crackle simmering around his forehead's pitchfork. (And did you ever see the special issue of Marvel's What If that, among other silly premises, asked what if the Inhumans had been a rock band, With Blackbolt as their Mick Jagger? The moment he opened his mouth to sing, the whole stadium collapsed.)

Yay Scott with the JLU ref FTW!

Izzylobo [heart] JLU Question - the writing, execution (and Jeffrey Combs' voice acting) turned the character from an abstract into a real (well, real as a cartoon gets, anyways) character. Masterfully done - you get a real solid idea of who and what he is, even though the Question appears in only five eps - and is only majorly a part of a few of those.

I'm hoping the DC folks do as good a job with Montoya-Question as Timmverse did with Combs-Question.

"Orange socks?"

Damn straight!

My sister trained a collie of ours to turn up its nose when she said "Army chow" and to take food from her hand when she said "Navy chow."

("Abnormal" would probably be true, but that's a description, not a name).

Xopher, #181: Oh, you got the fancy version! Your schoolmates must have had better vocabularies than mine, to whom I was "the walking dictionary".

If they heard bells ringing in the sheepfold at night, whichever ewe had a colored blotch on her back in the morning was coming into season. She could then be separated from the rest of the ewes and put in with an appropriate ram for covering.

(So for those of you in the bellwether states, when campaign season starts up, you know you're going to get _______ again. Ba-dump ching.)

Dare I? What? Dare I talk about the French equivalent? Oh, what the heck. The French for something that can burst into flames is inflammable. The French word for something that can't burst into flames is ininflammable.

The part of a hinge that holds together the piece screwed into the door and the piece screwed into the doorframe is the linchpin.

I'm on a lake kick just now: limnology, the study of fresh water, like lakes and rivers. Epilimnion, the top layer of a lake. Hypolimnion, the lower layer of a lake.

The sash is an assembly that holds the glass; the sash fits in the frame. In a wood window, the sash consists of stiles (the vertical pieces of the outer frame of the sash) and rails (the horizontal pieces of the outer frame). The rail of the top sash of a double hung window is the top rail; the bottom rail of the top sash and the top rail of the bottom sash are called check rails; the bottom rail of the bottom sash is the bottom rail. The panes of glass are called lights (we never spelled it "lites"); glass is specified in a variety of thicknesses and grades, though when I was in the business we mostly sold SSB, or single-strength B-grade glass. In a sash with more than one light, the lights are separated by muntins; more specifically, vertical muntins may be called mullions, and horizontal muntins may be called munts. Some people refer to all muntins as mullions, but that is technically incorrect (although widespread). The size of the pane of glass, and the number of lights, determines the overall size of the window, based on which region of the country you're in. Thus, a six-over-six Eastern double hung window with 7x9" glass -- which is written 7x9 6/6 Eastern -- yields an overall frame size of 2' 0-5/8" x 3' 5", which will fit into a rough opening of 2' 3" x 3' 9" whereas a Western window would be slightly larger (sorry, don't remember how much larger now). This would be so much easier if I could just show you a drawing, or better yet an actual window.

As for the frame that holds the sash, that raises a whole 'nother host of terms: casing and brick molding, reveal, sill, stool cap, rough opening and masonry opening, parting bead, balances (spring balances or sash weights and sash cords), etc. And then when you gang two windows together (which is a mullion window), you start talking about stud pockets, mullion centers, mullion casing, etc.

These may seem like arcane terms, but once you knew it all, all these terms made communication between the window manufacturers, me, and the contractors easy and efficient -- and accurate! I suppose this all comes under the heading of "jargon," that is, terms that arise in a specific trade or line of work. Knowing those terms, and being able to use them correctly, is a powerful thing.

And then there's all those crazy hardware terms such as "strike plates," which is where this post started off. I used to sell builder's hardware, too, but I don't remember as many of those terms -- I was on commission, and hardware didn't boost my commission nearly as much as window sales, so I guess those terms just don't stick in my memory. Speaking of doors, though, Malthus @11 -- those little thingies are indeed called door stops. Used to sell lots of them, including hingepin door stops (fit on the pin of the hinge) -- the little rubber thingies did have a name, but blessed if I remember what that term is.

It was long ago. And the winch is dead.

We feed round bales now, and they come apart like giant rolls of toilet paper.

There are four heat-seeking cats in this house who all seem to know when their warmth and weight will be most appreciated. I discovered, when looking for a word to properly describe their medicinal benefits, that a synonym for poultice - is cataplasm.

Some railroad terms:

consist (accent on the first syllable): the makeup of a train.

frog: the double V-shaped piece of rail that is needed at a switch (NB switch is American, points British). One of my grandfathers worked at a "frog and switch" company.

hostler: handler of locomotives where they are maintained:
interesting because this used to be the person at an inn who took care of your horses.

car knocker (obsolete): inspector of railroad car wheels who would check for flaws with a hammer: if it rings its OK, if it thuds, replace it

And yes, I had to go look that up.

Here we have 'noodling' for fish, which is what I think the extremely stupid task of finding holes/shelters for fish in river banks, reaching in and dragging them out. With your bare hands. I think they're farking nuts, but the practitioners of the art are true enthusiasts. Though before the stocks got depleted (like turn-of-the-century 1899-1900) sometimes the fish they grabbed hold of were large enough to suck the noodlers in and 'eat' them...

Patrick, I have much sympathy. I often get a hip bruise from the strike plate, especally at conventions, when crowding at doors is a problem. And I did not know it had a specific name until now.

And there's other stuff I'm not going to comment on because I just got back from an Adult Relaxicon and some things bring up ideas that are Just Wrong. (shrimp with lobster sauce just looks, urm, wrong in that state of mind) though it was tasty...._

Which it is, seconded and passed by acclamation.

I wonder if those familiar with other languages can say: is this a sport in those languages, too? That is, do people sit around, trying to amaze and perplex each other with what really strange words with obscure and specialised meanings there are?

Matthew Brown #217 : Terry Pratchett lifted the word scumble for a fearsome alcoholic beverage in some of the Discworld novels (maybe adapted from scrumpy, a version of cider, not for the faint-hearted, made in the county of Somerset in the English West Country).

Which brings to mind a term learned at one remove:

A bunch of guys I knew in college would get together for free-for-all drunks. The next morning, desperately hung over, they would pour together dregs of anything alcoholic and swill it.

This was called "spodiody" or "spote". Long "o"s - I've never seen it written. Occasionally stale beer from a can used as an ashtray got included. "Hair of the dog" could be hairy.

Wine spodiodi is evidently a real drink, cited by Jack Kerouac in "On the Road."

Dean and I had ended up with a colored guy named Walter who ordered drinks at the bar and had them lined up and said, "Wine-spodiodi!" which was a shot of port wine, a shot of whisky, and a shot of port wine. "Nice sweet jacket for all that bad whisky!" he yelled.

That sounds awful.

Malthus, #11, those are doorstops. I use hinge pin doorstops.

Bridget Kelly, #28, that's anomic aphasia. If you do it many times in a short period of time, talk to your neurologist. (I emailed mine -- I couldn't remember the names for any parts of the car when I made a service appointment this morning.)

tavella, #89, sometimes it's called a lemniscate.

Xopher, #181, in the second high school, one of the cheerleaders used to call me "Word."

Tania, #201, we use frog stitch in bead weaving, too.

shadowsong, #212, a rotary hand mill is a stationary stone with a round stone on top. The round stone has a handle on the top. You put the grain between them, kneel and lean over to reach the handle, and then turn it.

Wine spodiodi is evidently a real drink, cited by Jack Kerouac in "On the Road."

That sounds awful.

That crew certainly could have been consciously emulating Kerouac (or his drinking acquaintances) and delighting in the gross-out factor. One of the guys was always promoting meeting at the running of the bulls in Pamplona.

Yes, many of the first steam locomotives in America came from England - in pieces, generally - the Stourbridge Lion being the earlier well-known example, the John Bull being the later. Most were extensively rebuilt, however, the tradeoff between track quality and locomotive flexibility being rather different here. American railroad track was like a potholed country lane, compared to European standards of building - understandably, given the longer distances to cover.

I suspect that there was some deliberate refusal to use the English words for things, given the time period.

The standard gauge was definitely a British borrowing, although it only became truly standard after the Civil War; the South's standard gauge was 5'0", as I recall. The Confederate forces generally destroying all railroad equipment in territory they were forced to give up forced the North to rebuild - using their standards - and the victory sealed the deal.

The engineer sitting on the right is actually the opposite of British practise, which most times has the driver on the left. In railroading, the man at the controls is on the outside - to better see the signals. The famous Flying Scotsman in England was an exception to that rule, the LNER for some reason building right hand drive locomotives in that period. Of course, some American roads drove on the other side; the Chicago & North Western being probably the best known example.

C. Wingate @ 239:

Yes, the Pennsy was definitely the different one in American railroading; kind of like the Great Western in the UK, but much more powerful. At one time, after all, it was the largest corporation on earth, with a greater GDP than many nations. The one bit of Pennsy nomenclature I remember - outside of their calling cabooses 'cabin cars' just to be different - was the use of 'baobab' as the term for an outsize load that needed special handling. Apparently it was because there was one in a gardens in Philadelphia, and they're the broadest-beamed of trees. The word apparently was also used to describe a broad-hipped woman, unofficially.

In the middle of the windsheild, there will be a piece of yarn or thick string or something. It's called a "yaw string".

I've not run into this sort of vocabulary fun in any other language. However my native one works a bit differently and like german makes new words by combining other words so that frex: 'diningroomtableleg' would be a perfectly valid word. There are still fun obscure words but not on the scale that English has them.

DCA @ 271, a 'car knocker' would have been a 'wheel tapper' in the UK. (Stepfather is a train-spotter and photographer - is that what a railfan is in US usage?)

Apropos casting terminology (passim), to clean flash, sprue etc from the newly cast item is to fettle. (husband is a mechanical engineer)

Carol Kimball@ 276, the overflow beer that goes into the drip tray underneath the glass when the glass is being held under the beer tap, is called slape ale.

Not so very many decades ago, in working class areas of the UK this would all be poured off into a big jug and sold cheap, usually at the back door of the pub.

Or dishonest landlords would rig up a system whereby slape ale could flow back into the barrel currently on tap. Impossible to do with aluminium beer barrels and modern beer pumps, apparently. (Father has been a publican in his time).

I could go on but I have work to do!

My own trade (mathematics) puts a great stake in inventing terms. Either by co-opting "well-known" terms - such as structure, ring, field, variety (I could go on indefinitely) and giving them stringent and occasionally completely unexpected meanings - often (as with regular, normal et.c.) very many simultaneous meanings.

Or just picking and choosing from Greek and Latin stems. Such as homomorphism, isomorphism, endomorphism, automorphism, homeomorphism, diffeomorphism, morphism, monomorphism, epimorphism, catamorphism, anamorphism, zygomorphism, and so on and so forth.

Or by portmanteauing various words, giving us operad, properad and a variety of other words.

Of course, every single one of the here given words (and all the other really weird words that pop up) have very precise meanings, at least within any given context - variations are kinda ok, as long as you make them clear and preferably help build at least one of several consensi (pluralization?) for the terminology chosen.

Frazil - a slush of needle-shaped ice crystals in sea water. (Chris Pyne's "The Ice" is good for glacial obscurity.) Also "growler", a small iceberg.

In the US, standard paper sizes include 8 1/2" by 11", and 11" by 17"; these are cut out of a 23" x 35" piece of paper called a parent sheet.

(Really, metric paper sizes are much more elegant, but I don't see the US converting anytime soon. Sigh.)

Architectural drawings used to be white lines on a dark background called a blueprint; but starting about forty years ago, a process gained popularity which allowed for dark lines on a light background, and these are called bluelines. Modern large-size document copiers will usually have an option to make a negative image so as to handle old-style blueprints.

If you want your printed image to extend to the very edge of the page, that's called a bleed or full bleed.

And if the architrave is set back a little from the door frame, the thin strip visible at the inner edge of the architrave is called a "quirk".

A small tight mass of tangled fibre in a yarn is called a "nep", but a loose thick section of less twisted fibre is called a "slub".

French strikes again!

"...This usage of the word was coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). In the book, Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice words from Jabberwocky, saying, “Well, slithy means lithe and slimy ... You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.” Carroll often used such words to humorous effect in his work. (...) Portemanteau, from Middle French porte (carry) and manteau (a coat or cover), formerly referred to a large travelling bag or suitcase with two compartments, hence the linguistic idea of fusing two words and their meanings into one. Portemanteau is rarely used to refer to a suitcase in English any more, since that type of a suitcase has fallen into disuse. (Note - amongst older Australians the diminutive term "port" is sometimes used to describe a carry-item containing personal belongings.) In French, the word has the different meaning of coat hanger, and sometimes coat rack, and is spelled porte-manteau. (...) Portmanteau word was the original phrase used to describe such words (as listed in dictionaries published as late as the early 2000s), but this is now usually abbreviated to simply portmanteau. The term blend is commonly used in modern linguistic usage for words such as motel, smog, and brunch..."

A few entries above "TNT", you should find a word that means (I think) switching two syllables in a phrase. "The right to arm bears" would be an example, if I'm remembering right. I'm pretty sure the word starts with "tn*" where * is a vowel, so there shouldn't be that many entries to poke through. I've always been able to find it quickly when I have a dictionary to hand, but I don't have one here and this kind of searching is not the strong suit of online dictionaries.

Or perhaps someone here just knows it?

"I was flabber, as I said, ghasted."

"Do I like that? Abso-bloody-lutely!"

David stared in horror as the vault door slowly, but inexorably, neared his lunule.

p.o.m. @ 230: I've always heard 那 as na[4] too, and my dictionary agrees. I'm almost one hundred percent sure the "nei" folk is talking about is an elidation of 那 (na[4]) and 一 (yi[1]). Thus, you never hear "内两个" (nei liang ge)--it's always "那两个" (na liang ge).

folk on LJ: I guessing you learned Chinese orally?

I call that "skein guts", and generally celebrate when enough yarn has been knitted that the skein guts are used up and I'm now actually pulling from the skein.

Does anyone know the name for the little plastic thingummy that holds bread bags closed?

In my house the elastic loop used to hold ponytails was just called a ponytail holder, though I have of late developed an affection for the term "hair bippy". But it's not a scrunchy unless there's a fabric component.

If you want your printed image to extend to the very edge of the page, that's called a bleed or full bleed.

And if you have a white area around the edges of a graphic on your page, and something from the graphic spills into it, that's "border violation".

I'm of east Asian descent, and at the moment I have two barely-visible lunules on the nails of my index fingers. I don't usually have any.

Concur that it's only a "scrunchy" if the elastic is covered by fabric that's wider than the un-stretched elastic.

The tip of the angle of the jaw in the gonion.
The spot at the top of the nose, between the eyes, is the nasion, and the bump of the brow just above it is the glabella.
The point at the bottom of the nose is the acanthion.

Most medical terms are long Latin and/or Greek conglomerations, but a few are sweet.

re 282: What really forced Std gauge on the south was the contruction of the transcontinental lines, which were all (excepting some D&RGW track in Colorado) standard gauge. The war probably contributed to that decision, but standardization waited until the 1880s, so it's hard for me to believe that (e.g.) Sherman made it easier for them. The main conversion push was done in two days (May 31/June 1 1886).

My understanding is that there isn't an exact American equivalent to British trainspotting; at least, I hadn't heard about it until the movie. Railfanning is a more general term.

re 248: It's a little surprising that railroading slang isn't especially profane. Deprecatory of everything, but not the sexconstantsexly thinsexking absexout women that you see in shipboard stuff.

Re 212: I think someone else addressed it but a rotary quern is like a minaturized version of what you would find in a water-powered flourmill. The thingie that holds up the upper millstone, btw, is a rind.

re 219: Don't forget folio, quarto, and octavo.

Another group of curious words: the British names for the musical note values (beve, semi-breve, minim, quaver, and then it gets silly fast).

What's especially striking is how English has so many one and two-syllable terms like this.

A related word/concept is pleochroism, the property of displaying different colors depending on the viewing angle; e.g. if a piece of iolite is cut into a cube that's properly aligned with the internal crystal structure, it may look dark blue-violet, pale silvery-grey, or straw-yellow depending on which pair of opposing faces it's being viewed through. Does anyone know if there's a word that describes a sorta converse property, wrt something that looks different colors depending on what kind of light it's in? With most of the materials I'm thinking of, afaik their behavior is mostly related to fluorescence in the visible range when stimulated by ultraviolet-- e.g., yellow uranium glass is slightly greener in sunlight and phosphoresces lime-green in dark "blacklight" conditions-- but I don't know whether there's a separate concept in this regard.

Carrie S. @302: Does anyone know the name for the little plastic thingummy that holds bread bags closed?

The flat squareish bits of plastic rather than the wire-cored twist-ties, right? Looks like they're bread clips, a.k.a. bread tags, bread tabs, or bread-bag clips.

I perpetually don't know what the word for things is. Is there a word for that? When you know what something's called but can't think of the word?

Dysnomia? Various sites define that as "inability to remember names of objects" or "marked difficulty in remembering names or recalling words".

It's also a moon of Eris, named for the daughter of the Greek Goddess Eris: Lawlessness, the daughter of Discord.

I think you sort of answered your own question there, C.

"Wow, I wonder why slang used by a group of men who get home to their wives every evening or so is so much less profane and sex-obsessed than slang used by men who get cooped up on an entirely womanless ship for weeks at a time?"

As all the native southwesterners here would know but I had to learn after moving to AZ, "virga" means rain that doesn't make it all the way to the ground. (Interesting to watch, from my window overlooking miles and miles of flatlands.) But I may be alone in thinking of snow as "dandruff of the gods."

While guiltily watching that dance program last summer, I learned that both rap music and the accompanying dance styles evolve pretty rapidly and generate a bunch of terms I'd never heard of, e.g. "crump". Any specialists out there who can say more?

Stones showing a color change in different lights are sometimes called alexandritic, from alexandrite, which does this to an extreme degree.

My mother has a peridot which is a more intense chartreuse in sunlight/high UV light, and closer to primrose yellow under incandescent light, but I don't know if peridot is considered to be alexandritic, or if this particular stone is just odd that way.

Serge @266: OY!

Dave @275: I am fluent in a couple of languages and read several more and no, it's not an usual form of entertainment.

The thing that is glorious about the English language is that it is a shameless borrower/adapter/stealer of vocabulary and that makes it immensely rich. It also helps to have been created from such rich languages: as a professor of mine once said, English was created when a German, a Roman, and a Frenchman got drunk in a Welsh tavern. I would guess it's four times as large as any other languages, and it keeps on borrowing.

The best way to learn English, BTW, is to FORGET any other language while you're learning. Do NOT attempt correlations and parallels. Do NOT make logical connections. Inhale it first, think about it later.

Thanks-- I'm amazed I haven't run into that word before! One of the main examples I actually had in mind was "alexandrite glass", which is purple in natural light and blue in some types of artificial light; bead manufacturers have been coming up with variations of this in recent years, such as Swaroski's "cantaloupe" lead crystal that's variously green, grey, or apricot depending on ambient light.

There are lots of interesting terms regarding wool (from the spinner's POV). Knitting uses a lot of them too. Skirting refers to pulling out the undesirable and/or dirty pieces of fleece and discarding them. Kemp is the coarse hair-like fibers in a fleece, usually found in the breeches wool (around the sheep's rear legs). A quilted fleece is one where different colored spots grow at different lengths--the black spots grow longer or shorter than the white background wool, for instance.

Oh, and crutching/crotching is the practice of shearing the wool around a ewe's udder and rear before lambing. And scurs are sheep horns that aren't attached (or well attached) to the skull, so that they're easily knocked off. At which point they bleed horribly and the shepherd panics, until she (okay, me) realizes what's happened.

Evan@94: Thank your son for me, that sounds right.
(In the sense of, if there has to be a distinct word for the thing, that's a good one).

Zak@100: What is the difference between proprioception and kinesthesia?

Dan@265 & Marilee@280: But, but, but... doorstops are those things you put at the bottom of doors to prevent them from closing -- different thing altogether! Although I suppose you could call the cylinder you often see at the tops of doors a pneumatic doorstop.

Newburg, Missouri, a very small town near where I grew up, had a railroad roundhouse for the Frisco, and a hotel catering especially to railroad workers called the Houston House, which was the first building in town. For many years after ceasing to be a railroad hotel, the Houston House continued in business as a restaurant, with legendary fried chicken, buttermilk biscuits, and apple butter.

They're using it as a community center now, and the old railroad property is undergoing brownfield treatment to deal with the accumulated pollution; I don't know how much of the roundhouse remains.

Such as the hemidemisemiquaver. At our house, if we're trying to indicate the notion of something as being highly nebulous, we may say, "Oh, it's kind of hemidemisemi."

(Of course, this is not counting agglutinative languages like Inuit, where the number of words is effectively infinite, and/or the concept of a discrete "word" is effectively meaningless.)

spike 288: Talking of sheep breeding, the technical term for this (at least here, in Yorkshire), is tupping, with the tup being the ram. Tup is also used to refer to the head of a piledriver or steam hammer.

Did it originally cost a tuppence to have a ram cover a ewe?

ajay 299: 'Tmesis' is a cool word! And it's a word for something I do a lot, with humorous intent. Oh: the general term for a prefix or suffis is affix, and an affix inserted into the middle of another word (in a phonologically canonical position) is called an infix. (Linguists sometimes call the 'bloody' in 'abso-bloody-lutely' an infix, but they're joking. English doesn't really have any infixes.)

If an affix is discontinuous, it's called an interfix. Examples are rare in Indo-European languages, though they're part of the basic grammar of Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic; for example, 'moslem', 'islam', and 'salaam' are all based on the verb stem 's-l-m', which means something like "submit to Allah's will" or "be at peace."

John 304: Is that in any way related to the "Sallie Gardens" in the song "All in the Sallie Gardens"?

Ibid., 309: A breve is what in America is called a "double whole note." I've looked at medieval music manuscripts, and I don't think it's the shortest note, certainly; it's the note form used when many syllables are sung on one note. I don't know for sure but I will speculate that it's called that because all the syllables on it are sung as briefly as possible, before going on to the more stretched-out melisma at the end.

Faren 312: I think spoonerism is when you swap the initial sounds of words, as in 'hissed the mystery lectures'. Certainly that's the problem Reverend Spooner had.

Not entirely. The classic Spooner example is "May I sew you to a sheet?" as misspeaking "May I show you to a seat?" so that parts of words, not necessarily whole words, get switched about.

Eriophyllum lanatum, a flower which thrives on soils leached of soluable nutrients by the above described weather conditions, is also known as Oregon Sunshine. It has wooly leaves and chrome-yellow small sunflower blossoms.

And yet MORE "frog": the part of a violin-family bow that holds the horsehair at the end at which the performer holds the bow. (Admittedly, both of these usages are not all that uncommon. I'm just being a completist.)

One of my favorite collections of words can be found at The Phrontistery. Of course, there are plenty of lists he has yet to compile, but that's incentive to keep checking back.

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

On a tree by a river a little tom-tit
Sang "Willow, titwillow, titwillow!"
And I said to him, "Dicky-bird, why do you sit
Singing Willow, titwillow, titwillow'?"
"Is it weakness of intellect, birdie?" I cried,
"Or a rather tough worm in your little inside?"
With a shake of his poor little head, he replied,
"Oh, willow, titwillow, titwillow!"

Free Rice tracks how often people get words right or wrong, so the difficulty rating is empirically determined. The "correct" answer is often not a synonym of the question, but using one-word answers make that pretty much inevitable. Usually it's either a hypernym (less specific) or a hyponym (more specific), but sometimes you have to take the answer in a vague sense, or as synecdoche for a larger category... I'm not sure whether you always get the same options for a given word, & if not how the wrong answers are chosen.

Stephen Sample @ #252
So what are the two little cartilage triangles (well, cones, really) about a centimeter in front of my right tragus?
This is the most detailed map I could find online of the outer part of the ear (called the pinna or auricle) & it doesn't show anything in front of the tragus. Looking around, conical structures in that area might be "preauricular tags", in which case they're not cartilaginous, they're just made of skin.

Faren Miller @ #312

Switching words, like "the right to arm bears", is a spoonerism.

Well, it is a spoonerism, I guess, but a spoonerism doesn't necessarily involve switching whole words. More often it's a matter of swapping the rhymes/onsets of two words, like "you have hissed all my mystery lectures". (Or "the right to air balms", in a non-rhotic accent where "arm" & "balm" rhyme.)

[Of course, several people have already said this since I started typing...]

I grew up in TN as well but we had stobs all over the place. They were the short sections of small trees that were left sticking out of the ground after the plants were cut off by the bushhog.

Spodiodi turned up in the song "Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee" by Stick McGhee, later covered by Jerry Lee Lewis.

Malthus also says: "I suppose you could call the cylinder you often see at the tops of doors a pneumatic doorstop." We usually called that a door closer. Then there are door checks, which keep screen doors from opening too wide, but some people called door closers, "door checks," just to really confuse things. And there were hydraulic door closers as well as pneumatic door closers. This ambiguous terminology resulted in much confusion. Customer: "I want a door closer." Me: "Which kind?" Customer: "The kind that screws onto the door and goes like this..." [with his arm, he mimics door swinging shut, while making a "whsssh-bam" sound] Me: "Oh, you mean a pneumatic door closer." [because hydraulic door closers go more like this: "sssss-clunk"] Customer: "Yeah, whatever, just so long as it doesn't leak that oily stuff all over the place." [Now I know he wants a pneumatic one, because they don't have hydraulic oil in them!] Me: "This is for a screen door, right? So you'll probably want a door check too, right?" Customer: [runs screaming from the store in utter confusion]

As for my contribution, there's a tube or bead one uses to finish off a bead project by creating a loop for your fastener and then squeezing the tube tight with special pliers to secure the end of the wire or thread you've been beading with.

This is called a crimp tube/bead (and the pliers are crimping pliers, I believe) Now, that's not all that obscure a useage, but, a new product has come out which puts a teensy tiny screw in the middle of a bead, perpendicular to the hole through which the beading wire or thread is strung. You tighten this screw to lock down the thread when you loop it to the clasp at the end. It's called a Scrimp (tm). I bet there are other terms of art in beading that are fun, but I'm rather new to the whole thing.

You then note the value of the numbers on the dials as they relate to each other, and carefully describe the area in question with the pointer. When you get back to the start, you read the new values of numbers off and get the difference between them and the original set. After adjusting for scale and units of measure, you've got the area. It took a very steady hand and sharp eyesight, which is why so many engineers have to wear glasses...

Other highway terms:

The slope of a road in a curve is called superelevation. The slope of the road in tangent sections is called, well, the slope.

The grassed area behind a curb where the sidewalk is located is called a berm. If there's no curb, then it is called a shoulder (hopefully there's no sidewalk there either).

The dividing area between opposing lanes on a highway is a median. This applies whether it is paved or not; in fact, a three lane road (where the middle lane is for turning purposes) has a median, it's just paved.

The type of interchange where all the ramps angle in towards each other and there's only one set of signals controlling them is called a SPUI (for Single Point Urban Interchange).

It occurs to me that it would be interesting to compare number/frequency of words by number of syllables in different languages.

I like the use of stob to describe those short sapling stumps, though. Maybe I'll introduce/reintroduce the term when I move home again.

I have also heard "frog" used to describe the pronged object you put in the bottom of a vase to hold a flower arrangement.

JESR #327: If you want to discuss the iniquities of beta-blockers, let's go over to the open thread. I'd love to do a little testifying.

Yes, I grew up in Middle TN, but my parents were raised in Eastern TN; my father near Crossville and my mother in Chattanooga. Both of them called the cut-off parts of saplings sticking out of the ground "stobs"; the leftovers from bigger trees were rightfully called stumps.

I'm not sure when a "stob" becomes a "stump" but it's probably around the 1"-3" range. Stobs were also impediments to walking around barefooted, unlike stumps, although one could "stump" their toe against the latter...

The same expression in prefix notation, with the operator first, would be (+ 1 (* 3 5)); this format is significantly easier to write code to evaluate, and allows adding new operators without ambiguity, and allows arbitrary number of operands without confusion (ie, (* 3 5 7 9) to multiply all those together)), but does require the expression to be fully parenthesized. This format is essentially identical to Lisp s-expressions.

The same expression in postfix notation, with the operator last, would be 1 3 5 * +. This format is also easier to evaluate than the infix format, and never needs parenthesis, but each operation has to have a fixed and known number of operands. Under the name 'reverse Polish notation', it's used on some HP calculators.

I've not heard the word 'interfix' before, but it might be useful for the ternary operator in C and some C-derived languages: true-or-false-expression ? value-if-true : value-if-false

I encountered the word "stob" in one of Gregory MacDonald's non-Fletch books, probably one of the Merely Players quartet (of which sadly only three have been published). I, too, thought it was a made-up word.

On the names of the note lengths: Whole/half/semi etc. always seemed far too meagre and mean for something musical. But then I was taught 't other...

I'm of east Asian descent, and at the moment I have two barely-visible lunules on the nails of my index fingers. I don't usually have any.

after i posted yesterday, i went & looked at my (japanese-canadian) husband's nails. the lunules were visible in, i think, all but two of them, but i didn't take note of which ones. um, cause he was driving, & not sure why the heck i wanted to look at his nails.

Hmm. You might want to expand that discussion with your son beyond aglets. :)

"Stob" was certainly a usage I grew up with in southern Maryland. I was surprised when it drew funny looks on the west coast.

Sort of. You can have an operator that takes a known operand which tells it how much of the stack should be used as a variable number of other operands. Possibly not on an RPN calculator, but in more complex systems like Forth or Postscript. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack-oriented_programming_language

I just read that sentence in a book description (Systrophe: the background of Herbert's Sonnet 'Prayer') and felt it needed a home. I think it will be happy here.
-Barbara

petrichor (n): The smell of rain on dry ground.

Husband: I'm cooking Thankgiving dinner. I'm making a turduckenoostrich!

Wife: What's a turduckenoostrich?

Husband: It's a chicken in a duck in a turkey in a goose in an ostrich. Deep-fried!

Wife: We're going to my parents.

Disturbingly, people do actually cook turduckens.

Jakob 347: So I've been told. I don't actually know Classical Greek.

Hmmn. I've just checked, and it can also mean ANY raised or swollen area on a surface.

This is before we even get into "having a frog in [one's] throat".

Useful word, as joann said.

In French(*), the equivalent expression is avoir un chat dans la gorge, which translates as having a cat in the throat. That gives a whole new meaning to those times when a director tells his actors: "Say it again. With more feline."

(*) I heard that.

I was surprised to find, a little while ago, that people didn't know the useful West Indian word 'ruinate', meaning 'cultivated land that has been allowed to revert to the wild'.

It does seem to be a hard-working word. I wonder if all the variations come from one original root, or different ones 'converging' on one form of word? Somewhere in QI there was a question about the word in the OED that had the greatest number of different meanings. Now I can't remember what it was. [BTW, on the BBC QI site, there are short videos linked. I've been able to freely watch the single "quickie" from the current episode, but all the other outakes & extracts listed next to it bring up the message "This content is not available to sites outside the UK". Grrr. So far only series 1 of 5 is available on DVD. I guess they're saving the goodies as extras for the box sets later.]

In South Australia they have a unique characteristic object called a Stobie pole. I was wondering if this was related to "stob" — a word I've never heard of before — but from that link, it appears to be the name of the inventor.

More language-related boxes

*Why do pictures of gluten-free bread rolls keep appearing when I do an image search for 'housebrick'?

tang: the part of a knife blade projecting into the handle. (Actually the word can be used more broadly for part of an object projecting into another part to attach it, but the tang on a knife is most likely to be "everyday.") Definitely not just for breakfast.

pilcrow: a paragraph mark. Not to be confused with pill bug, for which people in my region (NE Georgia, USA) use the term roly-poly (n).

zest: the outermost rind of a citrus fruit. (I was very surprised, years ago, to learn that zest is a concrete noun.)

scutigera: a type of centipede. I discovered them on moving into this house 15 years ago and accidentally learned what they were called when browsing a book about "spiders and their kin." These critters look terrifying, and if killed in action, their legs will continue to move until a good bit of smashing has occurred. Now that I know they are predators, I leave them alone.

finial: a crowning ornament on a detail. The everyday version is the threaded object on the top of a lamp harp that holds the lampshade in place. I've heard of people who collect lamp finials.

dingbat: a typographical ornament. Some typographers apparently reserve the word for particular styles or applications of ornaments.

#130: bezel isn't just for jewelry; it's also the part of a watch holding the crystal in place. The back of a watch is often stamped "base metal bezel - stainless steel back."

#246 and #355: my riding instructor of many years ago distinguished between a "flake" of hay and a "pat" or "bat." The flake, IIRC, was the thinnest possible division of a square bale, often so thin it wasn't itself square. The pat or bat was a more discrete section a few inches thick.

But horse folk often don't use terms universally. I understand fights can break out over the distinction between chestnut and sorrel.

-----

(*) "Wasn't Sally Rand the first American woman in space?"
"No, dear, you're thinking of Sally Ride."
"Drat."

Dawno, #336: Well, there are some interesting names for bead shapes. Rondelles are oblate spheroids drilled thru the short axis. Bicones look like two cones joined at the wide end, then drilled from point to point. Go-gos are flat round or oval beads with large off-center holes, like a badly-made donut. Briolettes are teardrop-shaped beads drilled across the point; actually, I think that term was originally a bit more specific, but it's been diluted by common use.

In lampworking, stuff that you add to the surface of the hot bead in small bits is called frit.

And (#343) the knot around which a frog loop goes is traditionally a monkey's-fist. Someone else can have the rest of the interesting knot names.

I have memories of ads for Baltimore and DC strip clubs in the Washington Star sports pages (I delivered the paper for three-plus years in the early 1960s), which is why I remember Blaze Starr.

Alan Braggins @359 -- good point, and I should have thought of that and mentioned it. At least one of the RPN systems I've used has a 'rotn' operator to rotate N elements.

Because of the recent oil spill in San Francisco Bay, I have now learned that collision, in maritime terminology, only refers to one ship running into another ship. When a ship runs into a stationary object, it is called an allision.

Nifty.

That must have been fun for her at school...

"All you wanna do is ride around Sally..."

I'd never seen a scutigera before I moved up here to Pennsylvania. They're the most horrible-looking bugs I can imagine. My brother had to look them up online when he first saw one; he says they're centipedes. To me a centipede is a hard-bodied, multi-legged thing that curls up when it dies (instead of falling to bits and twitching). Scutigera is a much better name. My entire life is devoted to destroying those things. I don't kill spiders because they're one of my weapons in the war against all scutigera!

Diatryma at 378: Regarding really specific community jargon, when I worked at a used book store years ago, the term we used instead of geek was gurp (after the game, of course). Interestingly, gurp has a slightly different connotation from geek or nerd--it refers more to the enthusiastic collector of dopey things rather than the pocket-protector and multifunction calculator kind of guy.

Getting back to southwestern terms, I like "hoodoo" for weird rock pillar, like the ones in Bryce Canyon. Anyone interested in landscape terminology (American style) should have a ball with Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez, which came out last year from Trinity University Press in Texas. I still haven't managed to read the whole thing straight through, but just a glance back at the Cs provides goodies like "cove forest," "cowbelly", "coyote well," and "cripple" (which is similar to but not quite the same as "spong"). It's a big book with b&w hand-drawn illustrations for some words, and makes wonderful browsing.

I think you've just solved my Christmas Present Problem. Just the sort of book the intended recipient should have.

As for Sally Rand... She was played by a young woman, but hey, it was a nice scene, starting with the expected wolf whistles, then settling down with them just watching her dance. Beautiful music by Debussy.

I was told, as a student of Classical Greek and Latin at Oxford University*, by the professor who amongst other things, translated offical speeches for university functions into Latin and when required, Classical Greek, that actually Classical Greek has a rather small vocabulary compared to Latin and subsequent languages. But most Greek words have a wealth of different meanings, giving the language marvellous flexibility, thus context is crucial.

After those years of wrestling with translations from Greek into English and vice-versa, since I am in no sense a natural linguist, I am inclined to agree.

*I am saying this as context for the authority of the professor saying this, not by way of flaunting my alma mater.

Spinning has a lot of neat terms. On spinning wheels, the section that comprises the flyer, bobbin and support posts is called the mother-of-all.

The support posts for the flyer/bobbin assembly are the maidens (front and rear).

The holder for the bobbins full of spun yarn is the lazy kate.

A niddy-noddy is type of skein winder.

The rod that attaches the treadle to the crank of the wheel is the footman.

Wherein we all state our problems, and others pose solutions? I see no way, in this crowd, to keep it serious.

I'm starting to get educated on the names of bead shapes, although there's one small (2-3 mm) glass/crystal faceted bead shape I'd like to find in the online catalog that is eluding me - it's more of an oval so I don't think it's a bicone, which from looking at the pictures, is too pointy. I can occasionally find it at Michael's but there's too few in the package and the retail markup is pure thievery.

And "planishing" is the act of raising sheet metal up out of plane by striking it just so between a hammer and an anvil or forming stake. Do it wrong and you get a flat spot or a dent. Do it right and you get a little raised spot. (Physics is neat!)

We call pill bugs roly-polies in East TN too--in fact, when my cousin (from Alabama) referred to one as a pill bug once,

in my columbus, ohio, we called them potato bugs. no idea why. i used to love playing with them, & had a bad attack of conscience a month or so ago when i had to squish one that had wandered into my (vancouver, bc) apartment. i hadn't seen one in years.

speaking of regional idiosyncratic definitions: i always think of two that were used by everyone i knew growing up (as above, in columbus, ohio) in the eighties, but no one i've met since has heard of them.

"snitch" meant, not to tattle, but to steal from food that was designated for later ("who's been snitching from the brownies?").

"ditch" meant, not abandoning, but queue-jumping ("mrs. jones, joey ditched the line!").

i learned these definitions before i learned the infinitely-more-common ones. i still think of illicit desserts first when i hear the scary urban slogan, "no snitching."

And now I know how to say that when my cat climbed through the blinds, he pulled some of the slats out of the ladder.

Dawno, #400, a lot of times round facted beads look kind of oval. Here's a chart of Swarovski shapes. A lot of other Austrian and Czech crystal makers make shapes like Swarovski, and of course, glass bead makers, too.

A faceted oval... that size sounds pretty small to have a lot of shaping detail; I'm guessing that the oval outline is coplanar with the borehole so as to be visible from the side when strung, yes? The only perpendicularly oval beads in that size range that I can think of are the asymmetrical "magatama" drops which are (afaik) always smooth-surfaced.

Does the long axis of the oval coincide with the borehole? If it does, I'm guessing that they're faceted "rounds", which tend to be off-round when small; if the long axis is perpendicular, maybe they're "gemstone" rondelles. The same site also has general shape-based menus of both fire-polished faceted (molded) glass and machine-cut Czech lead crystal; if you're specifically looking for Swarovski, there's a fairly extensive chart for those here, but it's indexed by Swarovski's standard numerical shape-code rather than by name.

*firmly squashes the recurrent urge to infodump about Czech manufacturers' standard color-coding system*

A term I learned living in the South is barditch - the ditch along the side of the road from which the mounded portion was borrowed (barred).

As far as 5 year olds creating words, my sister once went around the circle of people sitting in the living room, looking at their hot chocolate. She firmly told them whether their chocolate had a "roo" (the foam only in the middle) or a "woof" (the foam circling the outside). You were very special if you had both a roo and a woof!

...I'm starting to get educated on the names of bead shapes, although there's one small (2-3 mm) glass/crystal faceted bead shape I'd like to find in the online catalog that is eluding me...

Try:
http://www.ornabead.com/

Darn. I'll bet it's full of really interesting new words.

His best word so far is twiggle, meaning to bend or twist in an odd way, such as what happens when you sleep on your ear wrong.

Please do -- that sounds interesting!

That usage of snitch was common in my family in central Georgia, but I can't recall if anyone else used it or not.

OK, Miss Teresa, should we go for it?

Of course, those families where there is more than one reader of ML would have to swear off that thread. I'm not sure that would be a Good Thing/Precedent.

Also in at least occasional use in central KY about 45 years ago, but not just for food. "Jackie snitched my pencil!"

Well if there's a tractor driving down the road, it will likely pull into the barditch to keep you from running into the toolbar even if the toolbar's folded up ('Look, there's a Martian coming down the road!'). You really don't want to tangle with an 8-row rollover plow. It can ruin your whole day.

It looks like the faceted rounds you linked to, Julie, are exactly what I'm looking for to make more chains like this one, but in a variety of colors. I wish I could order stuff from the Mode site - but I don't have a tax ID. At least I don't think I do, unless they accept social security numbers. I'm still working on getting all the business paperwork done.

I've almost given up wearing everyday necklaces, of which I have a biggish collection. With the lanyard, my permanent keys-onna-string, and hatstrings for outside, everything tends to get tangled up, bringing visions of the death of the murderer in Deep Red (aka Profondo rosso), so the idea of attractive lanyards is a nice one, but , sadly, not yet usable.

Another alternative to ffp rounds might be semifaceted seed beads (charlottes, 2-cuts, or 3-cuts), though that might not actually help much; although they're less expensive per unit bead, their standard wholesale quantities of "master hanks" (about 30k beads depending on bead size) cost about the same (~$20-30) as a mass of small ffp rounds, and they might not have the right look you want anyway.

Minimum order of $50 - $200 is ok for me. I have been ordering from Fire Mountain pretty regularly at about that rate.

As to FMG, I don't buy from them for two reasons: 1) they have become a seller of foreign-made tchotchkes, and 2) they ask artists to provide sample beads and then have them copied in China, cheating the artist. There are a number of better places to buy beadstuff, including Shipwreck who have these nice pages of fire-polished faceted oval Czech beads. I don't think ovals come in 3mm, (the Mode ovals were much larger) and you probably want 3mm rounds, but Shipwreck has those, too. (Bias alert: The HR director is a friend of mine.)

It's sad to hear what FMG does to the bead artists, I'll definitely check out Shipwreck.

I *so* love ML. Thank you to our gracious hosts for having a place where such talented and helpful people congregate!

Dawno: two more bead vendor recs for you: beadsrfun.com and dibeads.com ; so far I've only placed one smallish order from each of them, but thought their selection and prices were pretty good for low-quantity sellers-- both seem to have a pretty good selection of 3mm ffp rounds, packaged in groups of 50-100 beads. I've heard good things about Shipwreck, but haven't ordered anything from them because they use their own color-coding system which I can't directly compare to the standard manufacturers' chart.

(I lived in a house where, in the course of repairs and upgrades, my father discovered the rafters hadn't been notched to fit the plates. He put in small wedges to alleviate the potential problem (like rafters sliding right off in, say, an earthquake). We had unspliced joists, too. The (Italian) neighbor described the contractor by miming someone drinking from a bottle.)

You left out "king stud".

Dawno, if you'd like some further references for beadsellers of various types, drop me an e-mail at the link from my name.

Here's a good resource for small business. Even really small business!

It's a stanchion.

But I think it's more likely you remember me from when I posted on rec.music.filk.

The term “kinetic” is used by architects to describe moving building geometry. Engineers and physicists prefer “kinematic” instead, reserving "kinetic" for the analysis of the forces involved in a moving system; these disciplines oppose "kinetics" to "statics", and group both under the term “dynamics”. This paper, being on architectural design, defers to the architectural convention and uses the term "kinetic".

My quote key is getting sore.

They are called, reasonably enough, car stops or sometimes car stop curbs.